Co-respondents, then correspondents
Sarah Bradford
RICHARD ALDINGTON & H.D.: THE LATER YEARS edited by Caroline Zilboorg Manchester University Press, f40, pp. 271 Richard Aldington and Hilda Doolittle (`H.D.') are remembered as less stellar members of the imagist circle of poets presided over by Pound from 1910 to 1917. Aldington will remain for ever linked with his attack on T. E. Lawrence as an `impudent mythomaniac' (Lawrence of Arabia, A Biographical Enquiry, 1955), having already made a different set of ene- mies with his hostile biography of another Lawrence, D. H. a former friend, in Portrait of a Genius, But . . (1950) Both Aldington and H. D. were as much products of their time as their more famous contemporaries, the Bloomsberries. The couple were introduced by Pound and both worked as editors on the Imagist periodi- cal, The Egoist. They married in 1913 with Pound as a witness. Both published vol- umes of poetry during the first world war but by the time it ended their marriage was over and both had taken other lovers. H. D. was pregnant by Cecil Gray but had abandoned him to begin a lesbian relation- ship with Winifred Ellerman, known as `Bryher', eight years younger than herself. Aldington was rampantly heterosexual, H. D. took male lovers while Bryher was twice married, to the American poet Robert McAlmon and to film director Ken- neth Macpherson. Despite their sexual entanglements and the possessive efforts of Bryher to keep the neurotic H. D. under her wing, a deep bond remained between Aldington and H. D. In 1929 they took up the thread of their relationship in a corre- spondence which lasted until their deaths — within less than a year of each other in 1961 and 1962.
As expatriate writers steeped in Euro- Veez — every bear that ever there was must be going.' pean and classical culture and uncomfort- able with their Anglo-Saxon roots, Aiding- ton and H. D. were typical of their literary generation — Laurence Durrell, whose books perfectly expressed their ethos, was a close friend of Aldington's. H. D. was based in Geneva, her neuroses cushioned by Bryher's money and fed by a passion for Freud, writing Hellenistic verse and auto- biographical novels whose male characters were thinly disguised versions of Aldington. Aldington's literary career peaked early with his war novel, Death of a Hero, pub- lished in 1929; from then on it was down- hill all the way. He and H. D. sustained each other with literary gossip, and admira- tion for each other's work, a lifeline in many ways for Aldington as the critics turned on him over his biographies of the Lawrences. 'Curse the Establishment and the Lawrence Bureau', he wrote with strong echoes of Pound to H. D. in September 1959, `. . . the yanksachsen cen- sorship is very strong. . .
Left behind by fashion and the fame of poets like Eliot and Auden, his friend Pound imprisoned in a Washington mental hospital and Roy Campbell dead in a Portuguese motor accident, he felt increas- ingly threatened by the modern world, his hatred of war only equalled by his hatred of socialism. Of a young friend, a NATO interpreter, Aldington raged:
He simply facilitates militarism and has a tiny share of the fantastic waste of money on armaments, H-Bombs, shooting monkeys at the moon, and all the other insolent trash. What artist, writer, poet, philosopher, ever had any such privileges from the govern- ment?
He took comfort in the Ancient World, writing to H. D. of an edition of Egyptian poetry:
You must get it. Wonderful things, including a fragment of the one longish poem by Erin- na in lament for her dead girl-friend. Erinna must have been a wonderful girl and a great loss to world literature — only 18 when she died.
A visit to Venice, where American prices put his old hotel beyond his reach, pro- voked more rage:
As France is the last beleaguered citadel of European living, so Venice is that last little fortress of pre-machine times. And the machine-men and the money-men will destroy it... What a Threnody might be writ- ten on: The Death of a Culture. But who could write it? Not the author of Death in the Afternoon.
Aldington dominates this correspon- dence, as if he is trying to instil his own energy into H. D., fey, passive and isolated from the world in a Swiss clinic. There are few things more depressing than the rise and fall of a man of letters, failing in health and finances, out of fashion and out of temper with the times. An afternoon feel- ing runs all through these letters; Aiding- ton's passions and his diatribes are the dying fall of a lost world.
Previous page
